Revenge of the Garbage Nazi.

Byline: Kay Itoi

In Tokyo, we live in fear of getting caught putting out gomi, or garbage, at the wrong place, at the wrong time. And the scariest thing about gomi is the ladies--usually older and very proper--who police the rules.

Officially, these are simple: you must separate burnable gomi (household paper, kitchen garbage) from unburnable (plastics) and recyclables (glass, cans, newspaper, boxes). Each must be set out on specified days of the week at a designated spot, where city garbage trucks can collect it. Sound easy? I used to think so too.

One morning a few years ago, the piercing ring of the doorbell jolted my husband and me out of our futon. There was our neighbor, at 6:57 a.m. Forget "Good morning" or an apology for waking us. She immediately began screaming about the trash we'd placed outside the night before. We'd just moved in and hadn't even had a chance to say hello. Yet there she was, berating us for using her spot. We'd also put the waste bags too close to her house, some touching her fence! "Around here," she added, residents put the bags in a big plastic trash can instead of just placing them outside, as we'd always done in our former neighborhood.

That's how I learned that each block or apartment complex has its own laws on gomi. And in our area, this lady was the rule book. We called her the "garbage Nazi," and after that we lived under her thrall. She returned only once, delivering another fusillade for some infraction of the rules. But I would see her from our windows, eying our garbage. "She's checking on us again!" I would whisper to my husband. "What do you care?" he would whisper back. "And why are we whispering?"

It's easy to make fun of such paranoia. But some of us recycle out of fright, not concern for the environment. Take a ...